Obama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles

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Micromanagement Misfires

As attractive as it once may have seemed to put the best and brightest technocrats in the corporate driver's seat, managerialist approaches seldom worked well in practice. In particular, top-down efforts to micromanage corporate change have proved almost totally ineffective. An impressive body of research and well-documented case studies of large corporations reveal few instances in which a CEO successfully transformed an organization by preparing detailed blueprints for change and then directing the implementation of those plans downward through the ranks.

Instead, when successful transformations have occurred, it has almost always been the result of leaders who offer inspiring visions and values, identify clear goals, and then provide the context and opportunity for those below them to participate in the design and implementation of the actual business of change. That's why, in general, leaders of large corporations have moved away from top-down "planned change," and, instead, adopted a values-based, decentralized approach to organizational transformation.

And that brings us to the kind of President that candidate Obama proposes to be. As a student of U.S. Constitutional history, the senator's philosophy seems to have been influenced by some of the few words the founders ever wrote with specific regard to leadership. Significantly, they confined their remarks to the task of visionary leadership and were silent on the issue of management.

In The Federalist, James Madison wrote that the nation's leaders need to listen intently to the expressed desires of the public, but should not be prisoners to the public's literal demands. Instead, leaders in a democracy should "discern the true interests" and common needs of the people and then "refine the public view" in a way that transcends the surface noise of pettiness, contradiction, and self-interest.

Common Values

To appreciate what that means in practice, it is worth reading Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 "New Nationalism" speech. Delivered in a Kansas cornfield, T.R. addressed the specific and legitimate interests and needs of industrialists, farmers, financiers, laborers, small business owners, and conservationists, showing equal respect for each of their competing values and claims.

But he didn't stop there. Roosevelt then elevated the discussion by offering a transcendent vision of a good society that encompassed those conflicting values in a way that each group alone was unable to articulate from their narrower perspectives. He thus showed the nation the way forward by identifying the overarching values the disparate, warring special interests had in common, creating a compelling vision of a better future than one that could be achieved by continuing conflict.

What Roosevelt did not do is spell out the particulars of how that would be done. Instead, he outlined the basic conditions under which it could be done. He realized the key to implementation was the involvement and participation of all the relevant constituencies. This values-based approach to leadership is particularly appropriate when followers are deeply divided by ideology, religion, and ethnic backgrounds, as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Vaclav Havel each demonstrated in complex situations during troubled times in their respective homelands. Corporate leaders have also discovered that this approach is the most effective way to lead complex organizations in turbulent environments.

What kind of national leadership does the U.S. need in the next four years? That is what voters must ultimately decide in the remaining primaries and in the final test in November. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she has experience using the managerialist approach. On the other, it is uncertain whether Barack Obama is capable of transformational leadership because it is not something that can be practiced in a deliberative body like the Senate. And all history tells us is that occupants of the Oval Office either rise to the challenge or they don't. It is never known in advance if an untested President will turn out to be a Roosevelt or a Harding.

Hence, betting on a candidate's ability to provide transformational leadership entails an element of risk. Yet, judging from what we've seen in both the national and corporate arenas, there's a relatively high degree of certainty that managerialist leadership is unlikely to achieve the deep changes for which the nation's voters are calling.

James O'Toole is Distinguished Professor at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, and author of Leading Change and The Executive's Compass. He was formerly executive director of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, and executive vice-president of the Aspen Institute.